How to Make a Cocktail

By: Vasundhara T

1. Gather your ingredients. Think about what you're in the mood for.

Lay out your entire life for people to see. Pick out anything you find shiny enough to sell. Make a glorious story out of small-town causality and give yourself an identity. Swallow it like bitter medicine. Circumstance is your enemy, and the self an unattainable desire.

2. Build a foundation of flavour

Remember the walls you've grown up around. The road trips slowing to a stop, never ending. You’ve been playing hide and seek for so long; you make friends with the shadows. Remember falling, and embarrassing yourself and laughing until you cry. Your wrath and wrongs. In sepia lighting, all of it looks so grand.You don’t remember it being that sunny, but then, you were never convinced easily. 

3. Add in your favourite spirits

All the things you vow to live and die for. Everything you thought defined you, everything you held close to yourself. Your choices haunt you, but they keep you moving. The dreams and expectations you keep hidden in that jewellery box under the bed. Let them fall in. (Contention- They never existed because you’ve lived only for yourself for as long

as you remember. You forget nothing).

4. Blend it together

You remember a letter you had received once, full of love. It had a childish hope to it, one that gives, expecting to receive. One that wants to do and be better. You wish to choke it. Everything in front of you is the same. Run from it- the favourites and hatreds. The experience aches in a way all liberation is- it feels how bitter berries taste, painful and lovely, all at once. You don’t need anything, and you want it all. 

5. Cut yourself up. 

Take a step away and look at the mess. Blame it on your youth. The scars start fading already, but the wound never closes. (You know from experience) Do you throw it away, everything you've ached to get? Everything you’ve always felt like erasing? Indecision is a constant companion, and confused restlessness a lover. In the end, you throw it away, giving up. You convince yourself you never needed it. You are unsurprised, and so very wrong.

6. Start again. Succeed this time.

You've done it before, burned down forests to plant trees. Maybe the big budget movies were right- climaxes breed growth. Forgiveness is far but it exists somewhere under those veins. Maybe a small plot popcorn flix is more than you deserve. The cinematography, tinged with purple shadows, is where you betray yourself- with a still of hands holding your sins and salvation. It is all you have ever known. You start to like the director this time around. 

7. Squeeze lemon and pinch salt.

Into the eyes of that arrogant girl you could’ve been and the life you might’ve had. Pour the acid into thoughts and habits and languages and everything else you can’t make sense of. This world wasn’t meant for you- Your unstable hands and your cruel tongue. Throw the salt behind your shoulder to keep the lingering demons company. And to add to your wounds, when you get ahead of yourself. Never forget what you come from.

8. Add sugar according to taste.

But you have none. You were raised by the internet and you live in its opinions through a cracked screen. Still, you tilt the spoon because you remember picking mulberries and how you wanted the darker ones. It’s hard to believe, but it tastes better now. The sweetness lets you think about history, science and how you want to change the world, how you’d die for love. It is uncomfortable, and you never call back- but it is the closest thing to magic you’ve ever seen.

9. Sip and down.

You have held glass before, proof from a bracelet of shards you wear around the wrist as an aesthetic for your mistakes. But this time, it’s a tight gentleness. Like crossing he road with friends. Like falling on ice, spinning with laughter and fairy dust. The pint burns like a cut to the lip, of the love that you’ve been gifted and the anger you clutch. But it tastes different than you imagined. The novelty dies - s l o w l y until you’re outside looking in. Still, you dream of making another. You were born in an unyielding desert, and still, you dream of living with the ocean and dying in its multitudes.